Confirmation of what "they" always say

cariduttry

Hi all. Long time lurker, intermittent commenter, first time poster here. Long story short, I've been "fat" my whole life. It's always been a struggle for me to lose weight & get in shape. Couple of years ago, pulled my head out of my *kitten* (due to some yucky bloodwork results) and committed to losing weight & getting healthy. Lost 40ish pounds, still need to lose over 50.

That brings us to now. My weight loss has stalllllllllllllllllllled. Like, seriously stalled. There has to be an answer, right? So I go online and research TDEE to try and find a good calorie intake for myself; all the while, trying not to fall into the victim thinking with statements like, "I just have a bad metabolism".

So one thing that's often mentioned in these boards is that you have to have a heart rate monitor to get a good grasp on your actual daily calorie burn. I got a Blaze recently, so I've been putting it to good use. Come to find out that my TDEE isn't actually that far off of what the internet says for my height/age/weight/gender...HOWEVER...what I'm burning during a workout is WAY lower than what MFP says in their database. BOOM: weight loss stall mystery solved.

Anyway, just wanted to share for any of you who are dealing with similar issues. Don't rely on MFP to log calorie burn from workouts; do yourself a favor and get a fitness monitor with heart rate detection built in. Cheers!

Noreenmarie1234

Yes! According to MFP calculators and the machines set for my height and weight I burn 1000 per workout, yet using my apple watch I find I only burn 500.

Also my usual elliptical exercise according to the machine and calculators is 600 calories, but I only burn <300. It is really eye opening how much they overestimate.

AmyC2288

Congrats on your 40 lb loss so far- that is great! Thanks for the confirmation. This is the reason I have always followed the "only eat back 1/2 of exercise cals" philosophy or sometimes I'll log a 30 minute workout rather than the 60 minutes I actually did and just use it that way

pinuplove

Glad you appear to have gotten a good handle on the issue I wanted to touch on this bit of your post:

So one thing that's often mentioned in these boards is that you have to have a heart rate monitor to get a good grasp on your actual daily calorie burn.

IMO, that's not really the case. All you need is consistent data on intake and weight loss/gain over a period of time. Then you can easily back into what your personal maintenance calories are, based on your actual results and tailored to your style of logging.

But gadgets are cool And don't get me wrong - plenty of people find them very useful! I just wouldn't call them necessary for success.

middlehaitch

I’ve never used any device. Just the numbers spat out by MFP. They worked 100% for me.

Once I had a good few months of tracking I worked my numbers to get my actual exercise calorie burn (personal logging idiosyncrasies taken into account). They were close enough to the numbers I had been using from MFP that I didn’t have to worry.

Like @pinuplove, I’m glad you have found something that works for you, but I don’t find a device necessary. I used my own data to lose weight and then maintained for nine years without one.

Cheers, h.

Nothing against devices, they are just not my thing.

estherdragonbat

Same here! (Unless we count the "calories burned" indicator on my fitness glider, which probably isn't 100% accurate anyway.)

AnnPT77

Moreover - gasp! - what "they" say about HRMs isn't gospel, either. Heart rate monitors don't measure calories, they estimate them. They measure heart rate, and some fitness trackers also measure things like arm movements, altitude changes, distance moved, etc. They know your personal characteristics (if you set them carefully). They use the data they have, plus research data from population studies, to estimate calorie burn.

The basic methodology isn't all that different from the METS-based estimating methods built into MFP, except that the HRM can include some person/situation specific exertion measures in the estimating process.

They can still be wrong, possibly very wrong. They're most likely to be right for steady state cardio, but can be pretty far off for weight training, things involving psychological stress, exercise when dehydrated, exercise in unusually hot/cold weather, interval training, and more.

If you don't know your maximum heart rate from a well-run fitness test (not medical stress test), then the HR component of the estimate is probably misleading (many people differ from the age-estimated HRmax formulas, and that makes a diffence). Unusually good or poor fitness may also distort a HR-based estimate, particularly in scenarios where HR varies because exertion varies over the course of the activity.

Pinuplove is right: You need a consistent exercise calorie estimate more than you need an accurate one. Then - if you're using a calorie-counting method like MFP's - you need to monitor your intake, exercise, and weight changes over a period of time, 4-6 weeks at minimum, and adjust intake based on results (either by eating back a different % of exercise or just by manually changing eating goals). HRM or fitness trackers are one way to get a consistent activity calorie estimate, that's all.

Fitness trackers, overall, seem to give reasonable all-day calorie estimates for the majority of people . . . just like TDEE or MFP's calculator seem to give reasonable calorie intake estimates for most people. But it's all still estimates. They'll be wrong for a minority of people, because that's the nature of statistical models.

This is an oldie, but still a goodie:

https://www.myfitnesspal.com/blog/Azdak/view/the-real-facts-about-hrms-and-calories-what-you-need-to-know-before-purchasing-an-hrm-or-using-one-21472